Internet sites such as YouTube have found a way for content creators to reach new audiences. Similarly, these social networks provide audiences with easy access to a rich variety of content that would previously have been difficult to access, or would have relied on distribution by traditional media outlets. Members of the YouTube community capture video content from a multitude of sources and upload the video to a YouTube server along with a description/categorization of the content, and the video is converted to a common format. The content can be discovered through a search engine, and be linked to other content. The users themselves decide what to post and what to view, and the interventions made by YouTube are typically only to remove offensive or copyrighted material. Other than that, the content seen in a social networking site such as YouTube is created and selected by the participants.
With the increase of mobile devices capable of producing multimedia especially videos, it is likely that the amount of user created video content will explode. Mobile terminals have already provided important and useful news event footage taken by ordinary users. For example, in the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and the terrorist bombings in London in 2005, mobile cameras provided images of events taken by regular people caught up in the events. Such images were taken as the events occurred, and were made quickly available for viewing via the Internet.
Dramatic events like these highlight the ubiquity of cell phone cameras and how they can be used for news gathering. Even without a newsworthy event going on, though, individuals may still routinely document seemingly ordinary and mundane occurrences using their mobile technology. For the most part, this content is only of interest to the person who captured it, and even then it may be seen as disposable on later review by the same person who captured the content. Nonetheless, even a picture or video of an ordinary street scene may have value to certain persons under certain circumstances.
The typical content sharing scenario involves a user creating an image, uploading it to a site, and attaching some description with the image. However this sequence of actions may become difficult to manage for a mobile device user. Using existing content sharing paradigms, the user will wait until they arrive home, access the media, and if the media is interesting, upload the media to a file sharing site via a personal computer. There are disadvantages to this approach. For example, some content data is useful due to its immediate relevancy, and quickly becomes stale. For example if a person wanted to “peek” into their favorite pub to see if it was crowded, a video or picture taken in that pub within the last ten minutes or so would be quite useful, even if the picture is of poor quality. However, a picture taken in the same pub the day before, no matter how well composed, would have little relevance for this particular purpose.
In other situations, users may not even consider the content useful enough to bother uploading or sharing it. For example, a video clip of a concert may have been marred by an obstruction that blocked the camera view during much of the video. However, unbeknownst to the user, the video may have caught an unrelated event that is far more valuable than the concert footage (e.g., smoke trail in the sky from a crashing plane, a famous person in the crowd, etc.). Anyone who might be interested in something that occurred at a certain place and a certain time may desire to know if anybody there was making some sort of record of the event, even if the record otherwise seems worthless. Therefore, an easier way is needed to manage the various aspects of gathering, classifying, and managing content streams in the mobile environment.